A CurtainUp
Review: Trudy Blue

A circle inside a square is as good a metaphor as any for the human struggle:
the real world that stands before us vs. the imagined one that lurks just
beyond, the defined vs. the infinite, and so on. Mark Wendland, who won
kudos for the imaginative way his set design for the recent Broadway
revival of Death of a Salesman commented on the play's theme, creates
a cleverly effective environment for Marsha Norman's semi-autobiographical
consideration of this interior battle. Particularly evocative and realistic
photo-panels of a New York co-op and the cityscape beyond are drawn about
on a circular rod; the stage's exterior walls and floors form a square,
painted in a shade of red that looks like fresh blood. These sets are matched
by David Van Tieghem's excellent sound design, which is especially thoughtful
here.

Would that the play were as well thought out as either.

We learn from background material that it emanates from an experience
when, some years ago, the playwright was diagnosed with cancer, only to
learn after much grief that she actually had "just" pneumonia. Her on-stage
representative, Ginger (Polly Draper), finds herself in the reverse world,
and thus not as lucky: she's told she has pneumonia only to learn later
that it is cancer. Her doctor (Aasif Mandvi, who plays several other roles
as well) says she has two months to live.

The play's action, such as it is, recreates the moment Ginger tells
her husband, Don (John Dossett), the bad news. Everything else we see on
stage is some admixture of dream, flashback or interaction with a cast
of characters seen only by her mind's eye. Ginger is a novelist who has
substituted the "conversations" she has with her characters -- chief among
them Trudy Blue (Sarah Knowlton) -- for any communication with the people
around her: husband, daughter Beth (Julia McIlvaine) or Sue, her friendly
editor (Pamela Isaacs). Ginger also chats it up with her mother (Judith
Roberts), who is dead. It appears they didn't talk much while she was alive.

Ginger finds herself, not surprisingly, conflicted. She has precious
little time to sort out her life, and come to terms with the people she's
been marginalizing. Marsha Norman writes about all of this as if she has
something to say, as if her own peek into the chasm affords her some insight
she's now sharing with us. There's not much there. For all of its putative
reflectiveness, Trudy Blue comes off quite impersonal.

Norman also seems eager to make her story theatrically hip, shredding
up her time line, rewinding and replaying shards of her "moment" and juxtaposing
the tangible and intangible. It's an experiment that, like the play itself,
seems to lack a cogent target. Michael Sexton makes matters worse by taking
this edge and frenetically directing the hell out of. He grabs the absurd
angles and casts them into a funhouse mirror. A line about doctors being
clowns, for instance, prompts him to give all of the medical practitioners
red clown noses to wear. Why?

The cast deserves better. Aasif Mandvi, who I know knows better, is
called upon to embarrass himself. Sarah Knowton, who seems to have been
given a broad license to exaggerate, generally stays within bounds, but
at times would have benefited from more grounded choices. Polly Draper,
somehow, is able to rise above the muck and render Ginger precisely as
she should be -- frantic, overwhelmed and yet somehow a bit resilient.
Dossett, too, both as her husband and as her imaginary lover (a productive
bit of double casting), is on target. McIlvaine and Roberts are both terrific,
and Isaacs (late of Broadway's The Life), gets Sue just right, and
even gets to belt a few bars for us.

The price a young playwright pays for winning a major prize early on
(Marsha Norman won a Pulitzer among other awards for 'Night Mother in
her thirties) is the baggage of comparison. Norman, at the moment at least,
still seems to have a balance due.